bride

I Want to Get Married!: One Wannabe Bride's Misadventures with Handsome Houdinis, Technicolor Grooms, Morality Police, and Other Mr. Not-Quite-Rights

admin — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 08:00:00 +0000

University of Texas Press, Dar El Shorouk

The first suitor was a friend of a friend's husband. Along with his family, he came to Ghada's house. He was a doctor, she was told. Excited at the idea of finally meeting a potential husband, she washed the carpets, mopped the floor, scrubbed the stairs, and cleaned all the windows.

She opened the door only to meet Mr. Not-Quite-Right, her technicolor suitor. His shirt was yellow, his pants were blue, and he was wearing purple socks with brown shoes—not to mention the green sweater. "Maybe he is fun and he likes colors", she told herself, in an attempt to convince herself to focus on his personality and brains. The official introduction happened when her father entered the room. "My name is Samy. I'm a physiotherapist," he said. She was impressed until he started rambling about his "imitation skills;" apparently, he could imitate every character in this world. He eventually stopped sharing his talent and asked if the television was working. He turned it on and proceeded to watch a football match. Ghada held in a laugh and tried to pretend that everything is normal, but when her mother criticized his favorite football team, hell broke loose and at the ancient age of twenty-eight, Ghada lost a potential husband. Not only that, she also lost her friend who was angry with her for not being compromising to a "perfect" groom.

I first came across I Want to Get Married! in 2009 and soon afterwards, the blog was turned into a book by a publishing house in Egypt. The blogger/writer is a young Egyptian woman who is a successful pharmacist, but in a country like Egypt, success is measured by your ability to attract a groom at a young age. "The clock starts ticking the day you graduate. Personally, I started feeling like a spinster after I turned twenty-three," Ghada wrote in the introduction to the book.

Currently, Ghada is thirty-two and is still unmarried. After she turned thirty, her family and friends narrowed down her husband wish-list to a man "with a heartbeat." After introducing her to numerous men, from the technicolor suitor to the paranoid policeman who was adamant to get her fingerprints for "research," they gave up on her.

In her book, she chronicles the at least thirty prospective grooms she was introduced to from the age of twenty-five. This is how it works: Someone nominates her to an eligible bachelor, and the bachelor brings his nuclear family to meet her and her family. If she feels something towards him, they start dating to get to know each other. Not only does Ghada hilariously document meeting the men; she also shares the struggles of young women in Egypt who face societal pressure to tie the knot.

Recent statistics state that there are at least nine million unmarried women in Egypt. Social scientists consider rising costs as the main reason to blame for the delayed age for marriage, and they even use the term "marriage crises" to describe the situation of late marriage in Egypt. Diane Singerman, a professor of Comparative Politics at American University, uses the term " wait-hood" to describe the marriage situation in Egypt. She states that women used to get married by seventeen or nineteen in the past and men were ready to get married around the same age or even at twenty-five. Currently, the average marriage age for men in Egypt is thirty-one. Singerman estimates the cost of marriage at eleven times the annual household expenditure per capita. As economic reasons make it hard for couples to marry, women take the brunt of this delay. Ghada is such an example, but she took advantage of the digital age and empowered herself by blogging about her situation. Not only has she established herself as a great social commentator, but she reached out to millions of unmarried women and helped them deal with the social stigma they face.

This Ramadan, after reading the book, I watched I Want to Get Married! as a TV series and today, I will also get the chance to read the book in English as well.

Written by: Reem Abbas Shawkat, October 14th 2010

Entangling Alliances: Foreign War Brides and American Soldiers in the Twentieth Century

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Susan Zeiger

New York University Press

When men are shipped out to foreign locations to engage in wartime activities, it seems inevitable that they will become romantically and sexually involved with foreign women. In Entangling Alliances, Susan Zeiger explores this phenomenon, examining governmental, military, and societal responses to American soldiers’ desires for sex, companionship, and marriage while engaged in combat overseas. She argues that the changing ways Americans treated war brides over the course of the twentieth century demonstrates shifting American sensibilities regarding foreign policy, race, and gender. More than anything, because war brides involved an exchange of women across cultural and national boundaries, American discourse about war brides was ultimately about what constituted American manhood, men’s relationships with women, and the role of the nation in its relationship to other countries.

During World War I, the military preached sexual abstinence while devising methods to keep American soldiers and local women apart, in particular African-American soldiers and white European women. The army’s response to marriage requests vacillated until an official policy was handed down that marriage was a personal, not military, question. Meanwhile, domestic policy concerns in the U.S. triumphed over an internationally-oriented political outlook; xenophobia for newcomers was inevitable and Americans wondered if these foreign women could become good American wives. Though many predicted the demise of these marriages, evidence reveals that the majority made it.

In World War II, military policy differed depending on location. It encouraged marriage in Great Britain and Australia, both Allied countries with similar cultural backgrounds to white middle-class America. Likewise, American society welcomed these brides, suggesting that American women should emulate their domesticity and loyalty to husbands. Alternatively, the military encouraged prostitution, rather than marriage, in both Italy and the Philippines, while American society viewed these war brides as less desirable immigrants. Zeiger argues that both policies—encouraging prostitution or marriage—“shared... the intention to preserve and extend male control over women.” She also points out that though many of these local women showed independence and an assertion of personal freedom by going out with American men, sometimes against their family’s wishes, their stories “end with marriage and dependence.”

Race played a huge role in war bride stories post-WWII and throughout the Korean and Vietnam Wars. Congressional policy actively limited brides from Asian countries, outright barring Japanese spouses for several years, while all interracial couples faced social discrimination and, occasionally, found that their marriages were not legal when they moved from one state to another.

Zeiger argues that the conflicts in Korea and Vietnam saw the “demise” of the war bride as a phenomenon considered and debated by the American public. The military did not provide transport to war brides the way they did in WWI and WWII, and it actively encouraged prostitution rather than marriage, extending its WWII policy of creating red-light districts where prostitutes were regularly examined by medical officials and given “safe” ratings to prevent the spread of venereal disease. Korean and Vietnamese wives were not written about widely in the American press and they have not written about their post-war experiences in America, the way war brides from earlier eras have done. They have been, Zeiger writes, “all but invisible in American culture.”

Demographic information suggests that these Asian war brides tend to be isolated, even in comparison to other Asian immigrants though they have sponsored family members to come to the U.S., unlike earlier war brides. Though Asian war brides were an untold story, there was a lot of media attention paid to the mixed-race children left behind in Vietnam and, sometimes airlifted out and brought to the U.S. Zeiger argues that the story of Amerasian children, and the efforts to bring them to the U.S. allowed Americans to re-conceptualize the war, seeing both Amerasian children and American soldiers as victims in the story. “The American nation becomes father and, also, paradoxically, child. Vietnam, the mother, the war bride, is not part of this reconciliation.”

Entangling Alliances is a compelling read, illuminating twentieth century social struggles encountered by men and women on both domestic and foreign soil over questions of gender, race, and nationality. Though Zeiger argues that the war bride phenomenon died out with the Korean and Vietnam wars, clearly, soldiers still took wives and fathered children with Korean and Vietnamese women. More recently, stories of male American soldiers marrying Iraqi women have been exploited in the media. Because Zeiger only covers the period from WWI up through the Vietnam War, she leaves a perplexing question unexplored: What has happened with female soldiers and local men in the conflicts that the U.S. has engaged in the last twenty years? Have female soldiers, like male soldiers, engaged in romantic and sexual conquests with non-U.S. citizens? I suspect their experience has been radically different than their male counterparts.

Written by: Jessica Powers, June 5th 2010

Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan

admin — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

By Lieba Faier

University of California Press

Intimate Encounters: Filipina Women and the Remaking of Rural Japan is a culmination of professor Lieba Faier's fieldwork in the late 1990s in the Nagano region of Japan, specifically Central Kiso. For a few years, Faier lived in the area, interviewing both the Japanese natives and the Filipina women who came to Japan under entertainment visas. The Central Kiso area had a particular phenomenon: a surprising number of foreign brides from the Philippines either met their husbands at the hostess bars where they worked or through mediated marriages.

Faier discusses the two mentalities surrounding these Filipina brides: first, many Japanese thought they came from a poor and inferior country, and were looking for rich husbands; on the other hand, others viewed these brides as ii oyomesan, Japanese for “good wife.” Filipina brides who were viewed as ii oyomesan possessed “Japanese” qualities, such as being dutiful towards their husbands and in-laws. When interviewed, these women revealed that they were following their Filipina values.

Even though many of these women came to Japan searching for a better life and a way to support their families back in the Philippines, many found obstacles. While their visas were for cultural performances, the majority worked in hostess clubs, where they were expected to please men and get them to drink. Many of the women performed sexual services, though it was a violation of their visas. If a Filipina woman did marry a Japanese man, she faced the disapproval of Japanese in-laws. Faier recounts stories of Filipina brides who ran away from their husbands, working underground when their visas expired.

Faier's fieldwork is incredibly extensive, covering both Japanese and Filipina points of view. She does an excellent job portraying the different reasons these women came to Japan, and the various difficulties they went through. Intimate Encounters is an enjoyable read, not only for students of anthropology, but also for those interested in either Japan or the Philippines.

Written by: Elizabeth Stannard Gromisch, December 28th 2009

Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides

admin — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:45:00 +0000

By Ariel Meadow Stallings

Seal Press

There are some women who, upon getting engaged, will spend hours poring over the most recent 700-page issue of Bride magazine. There are other women who would sooner use that behemoth of a magazine as a firestarter than spend a single minute reading about the most recent trends in bustles and floral arrangements. It seems that Ariel Meadow Stallings had the latter category of people in mind when she wrote Offbeat Bride: Taffeta-Free Alternatives for Independent Brides.

A soup to nuts discussion of how to throw a wedding that doesn’t conjure up the term “cookie-cutter,” Stalling’s book relies heavily on anecdotal discussion about her own (admittedly offbeat!) wedding, along with stories and opinions from other “offbeat brides (and a few grooms).” This narrative set-up is great for getting a broad overview of what a non-traditional wedding might look like, but it also spreads the subject matter a little thin. While Stalling takes pains to point out that the book “isn’t a how-to book or a step-by-step wedding planner,” the sheer width and breadth of the topics that she tackles results in a break-neck pace, and many important aspects of weddings and marriage ultimately feel like they’re given short shrift.

That being said, Offbeat Bride would be a great gift for your sister, friend, cousin or co-worker who recently got engaged, but seems ambivalent to the idea of having a wedding chock full of taffeta, jordan almonds and traditional gender roles. It’s a warm, funny, easy-going affirmation of anyone’s inclination to “get off the beaten aisle.” However, the dedicated patriarchy blamer will probably come away from this book feeling like she’s just read 208 pages of stuff she already knew. Such advanced-level rebels might be better off perusing Stallings' book-related website, www.offbeatbride.com, if they want to skip the Offbeat 101 lesson and get directly to some more particular tips, examples and advice for their own taffeta-free affair.

Written by: Kate Dixon, March 26th 2007